Bashir turned and headed back toward the tent, launching into a lesson on ancient Egyptian mummification ceremonies.
If this was how their afternoon was about to go, Lois felt like she was going to go out of her mind with boredom.
She glanced over at Clark and gave him a long-suffering look.
He winked back at her.
In spite of herself, it made her feel like smiling.***
The afternoon had been so much worse than Lois could have ever guessed.
If she never saw another canopic jar, ushabti, funerary bead or other dusty, crumbling carved relic again, it would be too soon!
Zaid had eventually arrived to take them to dinner, and she nearly hugged the man on sight.
“How was your afternoon?” he asked agreeably.
“Interminable,” Lois grumbled.
Zaid shot her a questioning look, and Clark broke in, “It was very educational.”
Zaid nodded, but seemed to understand. “Not everyone loves this work as we do.”
“Is Dr. Bashir from around here?” Clark asked.
“I think his family comes from Cairo,” Zaid replied.
“How did your shopping trip go?” Lois asked, nudging the conversation back toward the story.
Clark rolled his eyes, laughing at her for getting right to the point, and she sent a glare back in his direction.
“We have everything,” Zaid told them. “Tomorrow, we’ll go to the generator early to fix it.”
“So you’ll be able to start work again tomorrow,” she confirmed.
“It looks that way,” Zaid replied.
Focusing on Zaid, Lois didn’t realize that she was about to employ her least favorite new skill until she felt herself go pitching forward toward the ground.
“Ow!”
Clark caught her arm, halting her fall. She recovered her balance, still holding her foot up as pain radiated through her toes and ankle. Looking behind her, she found she’d tripped over an open bag of dry cement, one that was sticking out from a pile of similar bags.
“That really hurt! What’s all the cement for anyway?” she groused. “I thought you guys were trying to dig this place up, not bury it!”
Zaid’s eyes moved from the bag to Lois.
“The dry cement is used to stabilize the sand and soil when we bring in trucks or heavy equipment, or to make the paths firm during the rainy season.”
Clark’s head tilted as Zaid spoke.
“Please, come this way,” Zaid said before moving off again, leaving them little choice but to follow.
“Are you alright?” Clark asked softly in her ear.
She was still leaning against him, his arm supporting her elbow. Tentatively, she took a step forward, then another. Clark kept pace with her, still supporting her weight. The pain, still pulsing all the way up her foot, was very slowly receding.
“I don’t think it’s broken,” she said. Let’s try to catch up.”
He walked along at her side, and she didn't trip again on the way to dinner.
***
Dinner turned out to be a major team event. Just a few minutes walk from the tents, there was a table and grill set up. She hadn’t noticed earlier in the day, but there was a little shed out here and four or five small campfires. People seemed to have congregated around them to eat, either on stools or folding chairs or milk crates.
Zaid walked them up to the table, which was loaded down with plates and soda cans and a huge covered pot. “Take a plate. When you’re ready, I’ll walk you back to the tents.”
Lois looked out at the groups of people eating together mere feet from them. “Why would we go back to the tents?”
“The archeologists eat in their tents, at tables,” he explained. “I’m sure one of them would offer to share their table with you.”
Lois had enough archeology for one day! “Can’t we just sit out here with the rest of the team?” she asked.
Zaid raised an eyebrow, and there was surprise in his voice when he spoke. “Of course! Yes, where you like.”
“Great,” she said, then motioned him ahead of her. “You go ahead. You don’t have to play host to us.”
Zaid dipped his head in thanks and grabbed a plate for himself, going to the giant bowl, and heaping a huge spoonful on.
“Is that koshary?” Clark asked, handing a plate to Lois before reaching for one of his own.
“It is!” Zaid said with a wide smile. “You’ve had koshary?”
“I loved it! I got to try it when I was traveling in Yemen. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve had it, though.”
“You will not be disappointed with this!” Zaid said, gesturing to the grillman. “Abo makes the best in town.”
Zaid translated in Arabic, and Abo gave them a little wave and inclined head tip from where he stood behind the grill. Then he headed off toward one of the campfires.
“What’s koshary?” Lois asked.
“It’s like a local comfort food. Pasta, rice, lentils, and chickpeas all in tomato sauce. It’s a little spicy; you’ll love it.”
They grabbed sodas and took the kebabs that Abo offered them. Clark ended up with two, and had to refuse a third, the grinning grillman apparently pleased to see his plate already heaped with koshary.
Plate in hand, Lois looked toward the handful of campfires lit a few yards off. The men were sitting around the fires in small groups, laughing and talking. Two men at the farthest campfire were singing. Her eye caught on Zaid, the foreman, and Wahid, who had worked the morning with Dr. Weeks, sitting alone at a fire with their heads bent toward each other.
“What do you say we see if we can get any information from the locals while they’re away from the ears of the archeologists?” she asked him, nodding toward the fire.
“Interview over dinner?” Clark asked with a knowing look.
“You know how I love to multi-task,” she tossed over her shoulder as she started toward the fire.
The sand between the tents and the fires wasn’t as packed down as it had been right outside the entrances to the tombs, where it was mostly protected from the wind, or inside the tombs, where she had spent most of the day. It felt like she was moving her feet through thick molasses, and she had to concentrate to keep her plate steady and move near her usual pace. On top of it all, there were clouds moving quickly across the sky, which meant that the moonlight would fade in and out, toying with her success at seeing in the dark.
As they approached the fire, Zaid and Wahid separated by a few inches, Wahid burying his face in his plate.
“Hello, friends,” called Zaid, when they were just a couple yards away.
“Hey there!” Clark replied. “Do you mind if we eat with you?”
“Of course! There is plenty of room!” Zaid motioned to the ground around them, and they crossed over to the free side of the fire. Clark held out his hand to steady Lois as she sat, plate still carefully balanced, before sitting beside her. She gave him a grateful look, tempered with a self-deprecating smile. Apparently Clark had decided to stick a little closer after she’d tripped over the cement bags. She couldn’t say she minded.
“How are you enjoying KV5?” Zaid asked.
“It’s fascinating, really amazing to be here,” Clark said appreciatively.
“It is the experience of a lifetime?” Zaid asked with a smile.
“Yes, definitely that!” Clark agreed.
It was interesting to see Zaid away from the archeologists. He was freer and friendlier, more welcoming and more of an eager host.
“Does it still feel like the experience of a lifetime once you’ve been working on it?” Lois asked him, wondering if bringing up his work on the job would shift his mood.
“Yes and no,” Zaid said more seriously. “It is a gift to preserve our history.”
“How long have you been working on this dig?” she asked.
Clark looked over at her with a slightly raised eyebrow and she made a mental note to try and make her questions seem more conversational and less like an interview while they were at the campfire.
“I’ve been working these sites all of my life,” Zaid told her. “When I was a child, I would run errands, carry buckets, anything the foreman needed. I helped pay for school by working on digs like this. After I graduated, I came back, started working again. I joined Dr. Weeks just a few months ago. Now I am the foreman.”
“You went to college?” Lois asked, surprised.
Clark shot her another look and she realized how that had sounded.
“Oh, I’m– I’m not being rude,” she said quickly.
Zaid laughed, though, seeming not to take offense.
“I just— I would have guessed that you’d have just stayed on and worked your way up. If you got an education, why did you come back to a job that’s mostly manual labor?”
“Because I went to college to study the history of the tombs.”
“You went knowing that you wanted to come back here,” she confirmed.
Zaid nodded.
“Do you use your degree in your work here?”
Zaid laughed again. “No, no. That is just for the experts.” He gestured toward the nearest grouping of tents, where she knew Carnahan and Bashir were staying.
Lois’ brow furrowed. “So you don’t use your degree at all? Did it at least help you get your job?”
“It’s not that kind of job,” Zaid said with a shrug.
“So what do you do with all the history you learned?”
“He tells us,” grumbled Wahid. “Again and again. ‘This is the son of the great pharaoh, that is the son of another pharaoh.’ Story after story." He took a big bite off his kebab, shaking his head.
“Don’t mind him,” Zaid said amiably, lightly elbowing Wahid. “He will not tell you, but Wahid loves my stories.”
Another smaller man quietly walked up and motioned to the space on the other side of Wahid. Wahid grunted in response, and the man sat, taking up as little space as he could, before biting into his own kebab. The comparison of the two men sitting side-by-side was almost comical; Wahid was a bulky man, but next to the diminutive new guy, he looked absolutely hulking.
“Ah, let me introduce Gamal,” Zaid said. “
He is the real talent here!”
“Eh, Zaid,” the smaller man complained lightly, waving him off.
“Gamal is an artist. Paint, charcoal, chalk, marble, wood, a stick in the dirt, anything. Birds that look like they are in flight, wind in a running horse’s mane, water that glimmers so that you think it is wet. You name it and he can make it beautiful, pulling life from dust, from a paper, from a stone. But what does he do? He mixes cement for us. Carries buckets of rocks all day and calluses his hands.”
“No time to pull life from dust,” Gamal said. He was soft-spoken, his voice raspy like wind moving through the reeds on the nearby bank. There was something melancholy about his disposition.
“Gamal used to talk about travelling, about painting or sculpting what he saw across the world.”
“Travel is expensive,” Gamal dismissed without fuss.
“Couldn’t you sell your art?” Lois asked.
The small man shook his head succinctly.
“Even with all these tourists around?” she pressed. “Surely there’s a market for local arts with all these travelers?”
“Scarabs,” Gamal said quietly.
“Scarabs?” Clark echoed.
“Scarabs, pyramids, cartouches, sarcophagi. All tourists want.”
“The tourists want trinkets from
ancient Egypt, not art by modern Egyptians,” explained Zaid. “They come to see the Old Kingdom, not the people who live here now.”
“No life in the dust of a pyramid,” Gamal sighed.
“What about you?” Lois asked Wahid.
“I don’t paint,” Wahid said gruffly.
“Or go to college?” Lois followed up.
“No college,” he replied, focused on his plate.
“You never wanted to leave?” Clark asked.
“I grew up here. I work here.” Wahid shrugged.
“He couldn’t leave if he wanted to,” Zaid said.
“Zaid,” Wahid drew out.
“His sister is sick. She was a sick child. His mother is old. She does not walk well. His paycheck stretches across the whole family. It does not pay enough.”
“Why stay if the pay is so bad?” Lois asked.
“I grew up here,” Wahid said again.
“He’s from Qurna,” Zaid explained.
“Qurna?” Clark asked.
“Qurna is the nearest town. It’s nearly as old as the tombs themselves. And it’s practically built into the tombs. Qurnawis think they own the tombs.”
“It is our land,” Wahid said with a growl. “We protect it.”
“But you’re excavating it,” Lois pointed out.
“The Americans excavate it,” Wahid grumbled.
“But you’re working for the Americans,” Lois pressed again.
Wahid stood and scraped the little bit left on his plate into the fire.
“The Americans pay,” he said, as if that ended the conversation. And then he walked off, which certainly put an end to it.
“Don’t mind Wahid,” Zaid told them. “He is all worries. They make him heavy.”
“Did you all grow up around here?” Clark asked.
“Almost all of us are from the West Bank. Many of the men come from farming villages,” Zaid said.
“I grew up on a farm myself,” Clark said. “I understand that it can be hard to leave, hard to stay away from the land that you worked and grew up on.”
“But you left,” Zaid said, a sharper undercurrent in his voice. “You work in a big city. You travel. You are here.”
“I am. I love the farm, but I’m a writer,” Clark said. His voice turned contemplative as he went on, “But my parents are both getting older. I’m not sure what I’ll do when they can’t work the farm anymore.”
“You never said anything about that,” Lois said with surprise, turning to him, and distracted from the tone in Zaid’s voice she’d been trying to pin down.
“I’m a farm kid, Lois,” Clark said. “Most farm kids take over the family business.”
A hurt she couldn’t explain stabbed at her chest. She’d thought he was a farm kid that had gotten out of that life. A man who was once a farm kid but was now her partner. A partnership that he evidently thought had an expiration date. And that was news to her.
“So you’d just leave your job? Leave the Planet? Leave m–” she stopped abruptly, then stuttered, “Leave Metropolis?”
The tension between them caught and held.
“I don’t want to,” Clark said. “But they’re my parents. The farm is their home. I need to make sure they’re taken care of.”
Their stare-off lasted another few seconds before Lois looked away and sharply speared the kebab on her plate.
Clark turned the conversation. “I heard someone say something about a curse today. Is that a local superstition?” He smiled innocently, but Zaid and Gamal both froze.
“Oh, sorry,” Clark said immediately. “I just thought it was one of those things like planting by moonlight or carrying an acorn for luck. We have a lot of those kinds of old wives’ tales back home. My dad won’t ever bring a shovel into the house. My mom even leaves crumbs for the faeries when they eat outside.” Clark chuckled, clearly trying to put them at ease.
“The curse is not a funny thing,” said Gamal stoically.
“The curse?” Lois asked acerbically. “You’re kidding.”
“There are many stories about the curse of the mummy,” Zaid said. “But the story of Tutankhamun’s tomb still haunts the excavators today. It is said that on the day that Carter opened the tomb, he sent a messenger to his home. When the man arrived, he found a cobra. It was inside a birdcage where Carter kept a pet, a songbird. The snake had killed it, the bird found dead in its mouth by the messenger."
“Don’t snakes usually eat birds?”
“Yes, but you see, the cobra is the symbol of the pharaohs. King Tutankhamun wore the symbol on his head, since the cobra is always ready to strike its enemies.”
Lois’ face twisted at the image.
“That’s a great campfire story,” congratulated Clark.
“Some say it is more than a story,” Zaid cautioned.
“The mosquito,” piped up Gamal softly.
“Ah, yes,” Zaid agreed, diving in again. “The money for Carter’s expedition came from George Herbert. The man was bitten by a mosquito on his left cheek on the day the tomb was opened. It became infected and he died just weeks later.”
“That’s just a coincidence!” Lois protested.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Zaid said, with the eagerness of a man that knows he has something. “When the body of the pharaoh was taken for examination, the doctor found a healed wound on the left cheek. Exactly where Herbert was wounded. Exactly the spot that sent him to his death. When you trespass on the resting place of the pharaohs, they punish you. Carter’s canary was the omen. Herbert’s death was the punishment.”
“You can’t be serious,” Lois snorted.
“Many of the stories are superstition, like you say,” Zaid conceded, shrugging. “But still, some people believe."
“Well, that’s just silly! It might be a great ghost story for a campfire,” she proclaimed, throwing an acidic look toward Clark, “but I don’t believe it for a second.”
“Just because you do not believe in the curse, Ms. Lane, does not mean the curse does not believe in you,” Zaid intoned in a low voice.
“You’re really suggesting that a man who’s been dead for a thousand years–”
“Three thousand,” Clark cut in helpfully, and she shot him a look that could boil a man alive.
“For three thousand years,” she huffed, “decided to get up to see if I’ve been walking around his house uninvited? I don’t think so.”
“Just be careful what you touch down there,” Zaid advised. “And where you step.”
She glanced at Clark, who seemed to be studying Zaid, and she decided she’d had enough of mummies to last her a lifetime—whether this trip was ‘the
experience of a lifetime’ or not.
“What is that?” asked Gamal, in a louder voice than they’d heard him use all evening.
He was staring into the distance behind her, and she turned to follow his gaze.
At first, she didn’t see anything.
But then, in the open doorway to the tomb, a shadow moved.
It looked like a figure, but was far enough away that she couldn’t make it out in the dark.
“What is that?” she asked. “Is that an animal?”
“It’s not an animal,” Clark said with certainty.
“It’s a person?”
She heard Zaid stand, staring at the figure, as well. “Everyone is supposed to be out of the tombs tonight. It is not safe in the dark.”
Just then a cloud shifted and the moonlight shone down on them, the sea of sand that they sat upon, and the figure in the doorway.
It was covered head to toe in white.
As they watched, it emerged from the shadow of the doorway, its movements broken and unnatural.
It held the form of a man, but something about it wasn’t quite right. Its motions were jerky, and it held itself like a Rodin sculpture, its joints not quite aligned correctly. There was something odd about its arm, as if its sleeve were falling apart. Almost as if it had bits of fabric trailing down its arm.
The figure raised its arm, as if shaking its fist at them.
One of the men at the next campfire over started yelling in a panicked voice.
She looked toward them, seeing other men standing, starting to yell and point at the tomb.
The figure in white raised both fists to the sky as the men all began to shout.
“What is it?” Lois asked again. “What are they saying?”
“They’re saying they’ve woken the mummy,” Clark said.
Her head snapped around to him. “You speak Arabic?”
“Just a little,” he dodged.
“Enough to understand ‘they’ve woken the mummy?!’” she asked incredulously.
“Gamal, get Bashir,” Zaid barked, and the smaller man took off toward the tents at a run.
The figure in the doorway, which did sort of look like a mummy, Lois had to admit, raised its arm again, this time to point toward them all.
As if on cue, two of the men at the far campfire broke away at a dead run, away from the mummy and into the desert.
Zaid called harshly after them in Arabic, then started moving toward the other men as they began shifting backwards, as well, seemingly anxious to put some space between them and the campfire story come to life.
“Clark, that could be the person that’s sabotaging the dig!” she said excitedly. “Come on!”
Without waiting for him to reply, she sprinted off toward the tombs.
“Lois! Wait!” Clark’s voice called behind her.
But she, a seasoned and decorated
lifetime reporter, wasn’t in the mood to wait for a farmboy who was only moonlighting as a writer, not with a lead right in front of her.
Keeping her knees up, she adapted to a slower run on the sand, keeping her feet light to try and move across the shifting terrain more quickly.
She heard Clark call her name again, still behind her but closer than she’d assumed, and she tried to put on more speed.
As she made it onto the pounded sand between the tombs, it became easier to run, and she was able to look around instead of focusing solely on the ground directly in front of her.
The mummy was gone.
Realizing he must have backed into the tomb, assuming that’s where he’d come from, she darted toward the entrance.
“Lois! Stop!”
Hearing that Clark was gaining on her, she put on a final burst of speed now that she was on more solid ground. She had to get in there before their ‘mummy’ could find a hiding place or slip out however he’d come in!
She was two yards away from the door now, a yard, a foot—
And then her momentum sharply shifted as she was whirled around and yanked backwards.
Caught completely off guard, she struggled against the arm around her waist until Clark’s voice said her name in her ear.
She twisted backward to look up at him.
“Clark, come on!” she complained, struggling against his hold.
“It’s too dangerous in the dark, especially with someone we don’t know in there,” he argued.
She pointed at the doorway. “But he’s getting away!”
“There’s no one there,” Clark said, sounding surprised. But how he could see anything at all with his glasses slid halfway down his nose, she didn’t know.
“He’s inside!” she exclaimed, shifting all her weight forward. “Let’s find him!”
“What’s going on?”
Lois startled and Clark’s arm tightened protectively around her middle as they both twisted around in tandem to spot Carnahan, who had somehow crept up on them.
“What are you doing here?” she asked accusingly.
“I overheard Gamal telling Bashir that there was a mummy in the tombs. His tent is adjacent to mine. It seemed like rather obvious news, but he sounded so panicked I thought I should check. When I came out, I saw you running and followed. What did you see?”
“We saw a figure dressed in white in the doorway to the tomb,” she said.
“A figure in white?”
“He was dressed as a mummy. He was shaking his fist at the sky, and then pointing at us. It looked like, well, it looked like he was cursing us,” Clark continued.
“And then he ran back in!” Lois finished, renewing her attempt to either squirm out of Clark’s grasp or drag him into the tomb with her. “Which is why we need to get in there and find him.”
Carnahan raised one amused eyebrow at the reporters’ disagreement as it unfolded in front of him. “I doubt that will be possible with no light.” He continued wryly, gesturing to his right down the incline, “And no help.”
Lois and Clark looked out to the desert to see Zaid wrangling the dig crew. Some had already broken away entirely, disappearing over the dunes, while others were holding their ground some distance away from the campfires, arguing with Zaid. They could hear the raised voices from where they stood, though they weren’t near enough to make out the words. But it was clear that the workers were not coming back toward camp or anywhere near the tombs.
“I think I’d better go and try to convince the men not to merely believe what their eyes have seen,” Carnahan said merrily.
Clark said, “We’ll be right there,” and she twisted again and pulled a face at him.
“In light of all of this, I think I’ll have to insist on your staying the night. With things escalating this way, I worry what else may happen before morning.” Carnahan’s tone was far less merry this time, and he plucked worriedly at his beard.
Pausing her attempts at liberation, she looked up at Clark, who shrugged.
“Sure,” she agreed, her arms coming to rest over Clark’s, which were still insistently holding her in place. It had been a while since they'd had this much prolonged contact, and she felt herself lean lightly into him.
“I’ll have someone show you to the guest quarters,” Carnahan said, then chuckled. “Assuming anyone comes back.”
With a cheeky grin, Carnahan nodded his goodbye and started off toward the group of arguing excavators.
“Will you let me go now?” she asked, twisting again, not so much to get away, but to look up at him squarely.
“Do you promise not to run straight into the pitch-black and dangerous, potentially collapsible tomb?” he asked teasingly.
“Yes, yes,” she said belaboredly, and he released her, his arm slipping away from her waist.
She turned to face him immediately, somehow gratified when he didn’t step back out of her personal space. “Who do you think it was?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did Carnahan sneak up on us? How did he even
catch up to us?”
Clark hesitated before replying again, “I don’t know.”
“After all, we must have had a huge head start on him,” she thought out loud. “I’m a pretty fast runner, and you’re no slouch.”
“Hey! I caught up with you!” he protested.
“That’s why I said you were no slouch,” she defended, rolling her eyes.
“Thanks,” Clark said dryly. Then, “Gamal is pretty soft-spoken.”
The non-sequitur threw her. “What?”
“Gamal. The artist. He’s soft-spoken. Carnahan said that he heard Gamal tell Bashir about the mummy, but Gamal has a pretty low voice. It would be hard to hear from one tent to the next.”
“Maybe he was louder because he was scared?” she suggested. “His voice got a little louder when he first saw the mummy.”
Clark gave her a half-shrug in reply. “Maybe.”
“Or maybe Carnahan didn’t need to hear it at all,” Lois puzzled out.
“If he already knew it was happening,” Clark took up the thread, “then he would only have had to listen for the commotion that he knew would start.”
“What if he was watching it all from somewhere up here?” she posited, testing her theory aloud.
“You think Carnahan was the mummy?” he tossed back quickly, working on her theory. “The mummy went inside. Carnahan came from behind us.”
“How do we know that there isn’t a second entrance? Or a third?” she asked, turning away from the tombs, and scanning the nearby hills of sand. “The tomb runs beneath us. We’ve only seen a couple of rooms so far. These old underground tunnels could have secret passages that lead out into the desert for all we know! We’d never see it with all this sand covering them! Carnahan had
months to check the place out: he easily could have gone in here and come out somewhere else.”
She kicked at the ground lightly to make her point and somehow even more sand went into her shoe.
Fed up, she gave an overwrought sigh, then put one hand on Clark’s shoulder to steady herself as she pulled her shoe off, dumping out a comical amount of sand. Her run across the campsite meant that so much sand had ended up inside her shoes she was surprised there could be any more left in the whole of Egypt.
“Do you really think it was Carnahan?” Clark asked, fighting a grin as his eyes followed the waterfall of sand coming from her shoe.
“I don’t know,” she said, sliding her shoe back on, then leaning harder against him to stabilize her balance as she pulled off the second. “It doesn’t make any sense that he would call us here, just to catch him.”
She dumped her second shoe upside down and returned yet more sand to the desert.
“Unless maybe he thought he could get away with it?” Clark suggested. “If he wanted the Project shut down, or Weeks removed, adding publicity to the mix would probably help.”
“But Perry vouched for him,” Lois reminded them both, gesticulating with her shoe. “Perry doesn’t give that away lightly.”
“Maybe we should ask Perry how much we can really trust him.”
“We can send him an e-mail from the hotel tonight. We’ll head back to get our luggage and while we’re there, we’ll use the computer in the business center,” she decided, sliding her second shoe back on and facing him.
A beat pulsed between them then, and she belatedly realized that her hand was still resting on his shoulder. She released him, her hand sliding slowly away as if it wasn’t quite ready to leave him yet.
Beyond the campfires, the men had gathered in a circle, with Carnahan, Bashir, and Zaid on one side and everyone else that was left on the other. But at least they didn’t look like they were about to bolt outright any longer.
She cleared her throat. “We should, ah–” She gestured vaguely to the group down the dune.
“Right,” Clark agreed.
And they headed off to see who was still left in the camp.
